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Wikia Search Launches Alpha, Not Ready Yet
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday January 07, @03:56PM
from the release-early-and-often dept.
from the release-early-and-often dept.
babooo404 writes "Jimmy Wales' latest project, Search Wikia has launched into alpha this morning. Most reviews have been negative. The system is a 'social search' and uses the Nutch search algorithm. You can friend people along with creating profiles, and the system uses a Wikipedia-style format for 'mini articles.'"
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Wikia Search Engine to be Launched on January 7th 189 comments
cagnol writes "The Washington Post reports that Jimmy Wales, the founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has announced the launch of a new open-source search engine, Wikia Search, on January 7th, 2008. The project will allow the community to help rank search results, in a model close to Wikipedia. However the company is a for-profit organization. This new search is supposed to challenge Google and Yahoo."
Wikia Search Launches Alpha, Not Ready Yet
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Aha, can't have proofs, but competes with google (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting!
Me thinks wiki should focus on its content.
Losing their way? (Score:4, Insightful)
Competing in the search engine space just dilutes their effectiveness even more. Google currently links to Wikipedia and one might guess that a very large % of Wikipedia access comes via Google hits.
I beg to differ (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Aha, can't have proofs, but competes with googl (Score:5, Informative)
Let me wee if I can begin.... nope... trying again...
OK, so the WikiMedia Foundation [wikimedia.org], of which Wikipedia is one (and the best known) project, includes Wikibooks [wikibooks.org], Wiktionary [wiktionary.org], and many more.
Wikia isn't any of those.
Wikia is a project of Wikia, Inc. [wikia.com] So you're WAY off in your throwing stones at Wikipedia over Wikia's search... the two have nothing to do with each other, other than the fact that Wikia search will almost certainly index Wikipedia and Wikipedia will almost certainly have an entry for Wikia search.
Now, on to your proofs beef. Proofs are tough. Sometimes overviews of them can be important, but they're fundamental examples of primary sources [wikipedia.org], which are not nearly as useful to an encyclopedia as secondary sources that give the context within which the proof is notable.
Wikimedia != Wikipedia != Wikia (Score:4, Informative)
You don't.
Wikipedia can (and does) have proofs (e.g., in the article on Arrow's Impossibility Theorem [wikipedia.org].) Usually, in-depth reference is out-of-scope, and appropriate for other Wikimedia projects which may be linked from Wikipedia articles, like Wikibooks (if it is contributor-developed) or Wikisource (for source texts that can be reproduced without copyright problems.)
Wikia [wikia.com] is not the same thing as Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], even though Jimmy Wales is centrally involved in both. Wikia competing with Google or Facebook is not Wikipedia (or even Wikimedia [wikimedia.org]) doing so.
no go (Score:5, Insightful)
On the web first impressions really matter and I think wikia fails horribly in that respect.
Please Jimmy Wales go and fix wikipedia, it needs urgent attention, especially protection from editors running wild, and please, google go work on getting rid of that spam and fixing the rankings...
Re:no go (Score:5, Informative)
From here [techcrunch.com]:
January 6th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Release early, release often.
It's a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We've been telling everyone that constantly. I'm sorry Michael's disappointed, but having said that, we didn't build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases.
When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What's this? There's nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!
So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn't launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn't have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.
We aren't even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that's not the point. The point is that we are building something different.
citation needed (Score:3, Funny)
Work on wikipedia's search first (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this will be rolled into Wikipedia once it's done, but it seems me to that their search algorithm needs *plenty* of work. Thanks to the glories of SpellChecker, I can't spell worth a damn... when I misspell something in Wikipedia, it rarely finds it in the results, whereas Google always know what I meant to type AND OFFERS ME A CORRECTION. On Wikipedia, I have to go look how to spell whatever I'm searching for correctly, then put it back into Wikipedia's search just to find what I'm looking for.
Very frustrating...
Re:Work on wikipedia's search first (Score:4, Funny)
1) www.google.com
2) (your search term here) -wikipedia
3) go
Presto.
And it's hosted in a nuke-proof data bunker (Score:2)
But at least Wikia Search is hosted in a cool underground nuke-proof data bunker [datacenterknowledge.com] in the middle of Iowa.
very bad (Score:2)
this will make people appreciate how much work goes into google/live/yahoo search engines once they use this
and no unicode support? wtf! i tried searching for Moscow in russian (lol wtf! no unicode on slashdot either!)
ugly 404 page too
Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Highlighted article when I search for "sex":
First result for "George Bush"
This is genius. I think I know what I'll search site I'll use next time I need some entertainment.
Which part of ALPHA... (Score:5, Interesting)
Which part of Alpha did these guys not understand? It is, by definition, "Not Ready Yet"!
Jimmy has pointed out that they're not even running against a real index yet, just a placeholder index. He even went so far as to say, "the search sucks today." The idea wasn't to launch a finished product that's ready for primetime. It wasn't even to launch a particularly working application. The point was to put something out there to demonstrate some rudimentary functionality while they continue to work towards something that does work.
You know, like a Beta.
I think it's kind of sad that Jimmy put something out and said, "Here's what it kinda will look like, and sorta how it will work," and people's first reaction is, "It's not a fully-functional working product? What a piece of crap."
I think I'll wait a little longer before judging. If you don't like the concept, fine, don't like the concept. But to bust its chops because it's not fully functional is a bit premature and silly at this point.
Re:Which part of ALPHA... (Score:5, Insightful)
I always took "Alpha" to imply feature-complete.
Personally I think it's crap not because it doesn't work, but because there aren't any original good ideas to it. Mini articles are cool, but not at all original, and the idea that they're going to populate them solely from user contributions rather than taking them from a free content source or buying them from somewhere is dumb. Sure, rating results doesn't work, but again, not at all original, and probably not that useful unless and until there are millions of people using the thing. Then there's the whole Myspace/Facebook/whatever stuff. Not original, not well integrated into the rest of the site, not interesting to me, and not a good idea in the first place (to integrate the two).
Wales says "It's a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine." Fine, but how does Jimmy expect to get people to build a search engine for his for-profit business? There are answers to that question, but I don't see where Jimmy has hit on any of them. The Alpha that launched today doesn't seem geared to developers. Sure, when Wikipedia was launched it sucked. But at least I could edit it and make it not suck! And anything I added could be used by anywhere in the world, not just Jimmy Wales or Bomis. What can I do with Search Wikia? Add to the mini-articles? Lame.
Since when ... (Score:1)
404 page quick fix (Score:2)
Well, this is Wiki, if the content isn't there, do something!
Wikipedia's Blacklist In Use? (Score:2, Interesting)
Can anyone confirm or refute this? Maybe it's just because the Wikia is in alpha it hasn't indexed much yet?
If this is the case I'd probably steer clear of Wikia; I'm not sure I ant my search results to be filtered like that.
Be careful... (Score:5, Informative)
More experienced developers? (Score:2, Offtopic)
From the footer:
<div id="ftcnt">
<div id="ftlinks">
<div id="ftcloud">
I am willing to be patient and give them a chance (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, last night I looked at their technical information site: http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia [wikia.com]
Some interesting stuff that I did not know about in their "Semantic lab".
Anyway, it is at least an interesting idea - time will tell how it works out for users, and as a business.
Not that bad (Score:2)
The results aren't that bad (tried 2 dozen queries, albeit only moderately difficult. all gave satisfactory results in the first few hits), and the integration of a wiki article and people-profiles are interesting concepts. The interface is nice and clean. I guess they could work on their integration with wikipedia; it's one of the strong points of Clusty. All in all not a bad start.
Then again, maybe I'm just not as critical about the results. I haven't used Google Search as my main search engine for a couple of years, but with time I could see wikia search become one of my regulars. All I can say is keep it up!
When will the madness stop? (Score:2)
Huh? You mean I have to RTFA to figure out what this means?
Where's a grammar Nazi when you need them most...
Wikipedia.org Search Sucks (Score:2, Interesting)
Typo (Score:1)
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Falpha.search.wikia.com%2F [w3.org]
My own attempt at a social search (Score:1)
http://jumphunt.com/ [jumphunt.com]
Essentially, you type "g" to search google, "y" to search yahoo, etc. You can add and take away from the defaults. You can share, grab from other users, discuss sites, etc (that's the social aspect). You also get your own no-login-needed homepage to jump to sites. You can then add your own search box to your Firefox search box (the site performs suggestions too).
Other aspects:
-There are minimal ads.. a grand total of 2 in the entire site... and not on your custom home page.
-Absolutely no email address is needed and never will be.
It is still in alpha too (site is about 5 days old), but what do you think? I'm pretty proud of it. I'm using mod-rewrite, AJAX, JSON, XML, etc. I learned a lot from making it. I am not making a dime off this site. My real business is hosting.
Hope you enjoy,
-Dan
Chicken and egg (Score:2)
Its quality isn't going to improve if nobody uses it.
lame (Score:1)
Searched for "Tampa hotels", got bottom-feeders (Score:4, Interesting)
Wales was quoted recently complaining about Google's results for "Tampa hotels" [searchengineland.com], and talking about how Wikia was going to be better. So I searched Wikia for "Tampa hotels".
The first three results from Wikia search are all from the domain "visit-tampa-bay.com". That's one of those bottom-feeder ad link sites. The site is supposed to redirect traffic to Orbitz, but doesn't even do that right. Very disappointing result. Could they have been spammed already?
Trying "Tampa hotels" in Google gets us "travel.yahoo.com" for the top two results, which indicates that Google isn't biasing their search against their biggest competitor. Next is "traveladvisor.com". Those are OK results; you'd be able to get a hotel room that way.
Trying "Tampa hotels" in Yahoo search gets us a page from one of Yahoo's special cases. Yahoo knows about "hotels", so we get a list of hotels and prices from Yahoo, and three sponsored results. The top organic result is "tripadvisor.com", which is at least a big-name travel site, followed by "visittampabay.com" (not to be confused with "visit-tampa-bay.com"), the site for the local Convention and Visitor's Bureau. Yahoo certainly tries hard for hotel searches, and seems to be doing OK.
Trying "Tampa hotels" in MSN search gets results that look much like Yahoo's, but with lower result quality. MSN understands hotels as a special case. There are three sponsored results, and addresses and phone numbers for three real hotels. The first three organic search results are Yahoo Travel, "tampa-hotels.net" (an ad-laden landing page), and "tampa-hotels-discounts.net" (a bottom-feeder generic landing page that isn't even on topic.) Poor results.
Trying our own SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] the top result is "all-hotels.com", which has a list of hotels with pictures and a reservation interface. The second result is Yahoo Travel, and the third is Expedia. We're sorting Yahoo results on business legitimacy, so that's not surprising. OK here.
So there's where Wikia is today, on their recommended demo search.
Woah (Score:2)
Anyway, it looks like there's the opportunity here to *improve* this search engine -- programmers, I know you are reading, and at least check out the code. There's been talk about running some competitions for improving the search results (the scoring algorithms), how many of us would like to form a team? Maybe I'll do one. Who's with me?
(Btw, these guys need help. I just found all of this after the recent news articles.) Screw my mod points.
Works great for me (Score:1)
There's a reason search algorithm can't be open. (Score:1)
Back when google actually used pagerank, the results were OK, but they soon sucked as everyone started to game the system. Knowing the algorithm means sites designed specifically for high standings rather than for best content. They continually avoid this problem by changing the algorithm in secret.
With an open source search algorithm, every result will not be the best site, but the one where the designer is willing to torture the content in a particular way. Then everyone will torture their content, and the results will be completely irrelevant.
This is one of the rare places where closed, proprietary, secret systems actually make things better.
Flawed business model (Score:1)
1. Google can do it better if Wikia works
Insofar as Wikia derives competitive advantage over Google from community support of search result ranking, Google can copy the model easily.
In order for it to scale within Wikia, a large number of users must contribute to ranking. Once so trained, most of these users would not resist contributing in the same way to Google's rankings. The community of search ranking raters is very different from the kind of community that supports open source development, for example. It is much larger, much lower common denominator, concerned with results, without any axes to grind with the search providor.
Google, with its large user base, would soon overcome any initial Wikia advantage in stored rating data.
I do not see any other competitive advantage Wikia might depend on. On the other hand, I can think of a host of advantages Google enjoys (which I will not bother to list here).
2. The ratio of hard costs is high, and the scale is large
I suspect that the cost of infrastructure (machines, data centers, power, and people) to host the web in memory to support low-latency search at the Google scale would be difficult to support with a community model.
Most Wikipedia support comes from individual donations of spare time from the broader community (i.e., articles). I would think that Wikipedia's content-to-hosting cost ratio is orders of magnitude better than Wikia's would be.